Graue's "SoftSat"

Graue softsat is a little tube-style saturating limiter that I like to use for mastering purposes. It keeps the input below 0 dB by adding minimal, warm sounding distortion.

The formula this implements is from Bram de Jong: http://musicdsp.org/showArchiveComment.php?ArchiveID=42

This effect is little more than an implementation of that formula, so thank him for how good it sounds.

The "hardness" control is a tradeoff between the amount of distortion (harder = more distorted) and how much quieter the input gets (softer = quieter). The default value of 0.5 usually seems to work well. Unless your song is rather loud, you might not even notice a difference between 0.0 and 1.0. -- it can be subtle.